Talking With Children, Not Just To Them: The Power of Back-and-Forth

How often during the day do we fill children with words? “Did you do your homework? Wash your hands. Put your shoes on.” We talk a lot, but not always with them, meaning that we wait for a reply and pass the ball back.

For years it has been said that children from more affluent families hear about 30 million more words in their first three years. A 2018 study led by Rachel Romeo and colleagues between Harvard and MIT, published in Psychological Science, tried to look beyond the word count. It involved 36 children aged 4 to 6, who wore a recorder for two days. The researchers counted the adults' words, the children's words and the “conversational turns”: a sentence from the adult followed by one from the child, or vice versa, with a pause of no more than five seconds.

The children then listened to short stories inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and took language tests. More conversational turns were associated with higher scores in vocabulary, grammar and verbal reasoning, and with greater activation of Broca's area, a region of the left frontal cortex linked to language. The association held even when accounting for the parents' income and education and for the sheer number of words spoken by the adults. As Rachel Romeo explained, it is not about pouring words onto children, but about supporting a genuine conversation.

A few cautions. The sample is small, the children were typically developing and spoke English; the study shows associations and does not prove that conversational turns cause better language (the authors themselves present this as a hypothesis to be tested in future studies); and the recordings cover only two days.

What can we do at home? These are our own common-sense suggestions, not findings of the study. Ask an open question (“What did you like best today?”) and wait a few seconds before adding anything. Pick up what the child said and extend it by one sentence. Follow their topic, even if it is dinosaurs for the third time. And switch your phone off for ten minutes: a back-and-forth needs two people who look at each other.

And at your home, when do the best back-and-forths happen? At the table, in the car, before bedtime? Tell us in the comments: I love reading about your moments.

Sources

• Romeo, R. R., Leonard, J. A., Robinson, S. T., West, M. R., Mackey, A. P., Rowe, M. L., Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2018), “Beyond the 30-Million-Word Gap: Children's Conversational Exposure Is Associated With Language-Related Brain Function”, Psychological Science. DOI 10.1177/0956797617742725
• MIT News / NeuroscienceNews (14 February 2018), “Back and Forth Exchanges Boost Children's Brain Response to Language”